Farms

[TheDarkside]

I played around a lot with farms today and they are easily the most disappointing building in the game...

They require quite a bit of micromanagement due to seasons and the sheer quantity of goods you can produce yet the profits from this building are negligible, you can easily lose money too.

I find the best items are the grains - wheat, barley and oats. They are easy to grow (any season) and the profits are decent and as long as you dont have 5 farmers all growing same grains saturating the market can be somewhat managed.

Eggs, veggies and fruit are so cheap they are pointless to grow. You may even lose money on them.

The farm animals are the worst.

Except for milk, you will guaranteed to lose money. I think the biggest problem is the production time is far too long.

Here are some quick examples from a farm with 5 workers and all upgrades:

Setting all my production to milk, by end of the day I get ~38 milk which with good prices(18) means I can sell to get a total profit of 184 gold after subtracting the 500 salary for all my farmers. Pretty paltry.

Setting all to carcass and hides, I ended up with ~3 (though some days only 2!) of each and when I sell to market for best prices I end up with a LOSS of 71 gold after I factor in farmer wages

Setting all to wool, I got ~18 wool at end of day with good market price (18) sold for a LOSS of 176 gold after factoring farmer wages.

Clearly the animal side of farms need to be looked at.

Also why should farmers default to same wage as a worker in a leather worker shop of jewler? I know I can lower their wages but then won't the efficiency loss just make my profits worse? I can experiment with that next...

Actually, I'd love to see two separate farm types - one for crops one for animals, where the animals one actually require grains for the animals to grow and the profits much improved.

[Atorcoppe]

Great feedback. I’ll make good adjustments in a near future update.

[Hypnoticborrat]

I couldn't disagree more. Actually, the farm is my most favorite building. The problem with fruit, vegetable and eggs is, that the market is easily oversaturated due to people gathering those in their spare time and then selling it to the market. Also, monks gather honey, which makes producing honey bad.

You should never focus your production on one item alone. I usually grow barley / wheat / oats using the two fields, always having the two workers work on different grains. Then I add carcass & hide and milk production to the two corrals. I do nice profits this way.

You have to watch the markets. Sometimes it's worth going all the way down to another market. That's why the tier 3 cart upgrade is absolutely essential. But the farm truly shines if you have a mill and a butcher.

[Hypnoticborrat]

Also, if the market is oversaturated, just store your surplus, produce something else, and when the market is in need of supplies, sell out of your storage. It's actually a viable strategy to use your house as a store room.

[Atorcoppe]

There is also a chance that people will store their fruit, veges, and eggs in their houses to eat later instead of selling. This is a thing that can be tweaked to make it more likely.


@hypno: the house even has a storage cellar upgrade for that reason.

I do feel though there is lots of room for tweaking in regards to timers and wages.

[TheDarkside]

Well, one thing is I found out later that adding more workers to same item is actually a pretty bad thing. I was testing with 5x farmers doing the same thing. I thought they would basically be doing 5x the production but instead it was a drastic reduction in total farm output.

I am planning to re-evaluate the farm having each farmer doing a separate crop.

But besides that, I do work all the markets and generally only sell things at max selling price.

[White Knight]

I'm only working on my second playthrough at this point, so I don't really feel as though I have a worthwhile opinion about how the economy works yet. Having said that, some things do appear rather clear already.

I consider the farm to be one of my most valued properties. My tiny empire consists of ten businesses, etc. at the moment. My farms supply them with the raw materials I need to manufacture the goods I sell for profit.

Before having farms, I was completely dependent upon the availabilty and price volatility of the marketplaces...factors that were out of my control. Making tiny profits took a lot of work on my part, for minimal returns.

With farms, I supply my businesses with the raw materials they need, never give my money to merchants but rather take their money when I sell off the manufactured items I produce. The gold is flowing in and I spend all of my time playing music in the street. The only work I do anymore is picking loads of apples for a few days each summer.

Even if the farm itself wasn't generating profits, the savings it gives me by supplying my other business ventures more than makes up for those losses. The freedom and peace of mind I get from farms is worth more than the gold itself.

I'd happily buy your farms off you if I could.

[PartyMaster]

I severely disagree mate. The farm is by far the most profitable building you could own in the game and its the first building you should even think about owning. to start off yea, don't make carcasses/pig hides or sheep wool unless you have buildings that put that stuff to use like a butcher shop and etc. because then you can make ridiculous amounts of money with just 1 carcass and hide since meat sells for $21 and you get 10 of it with 1 carcass and the hide is almost just as expensive and you get 6 per hide.

Starting off you should just be making barley, wheat, oats, vegetables, fruit and milk because you can get the quickest amounts of profit off of them. barley and wheat are the 2 best to sell to markets that have a very high demand for them because you can grow them easily and sell them in bulk when they sell for around $14 a pop. When the markets have barley, wheat and oats all in them, they will more than likely have little to no fruit or vegetables and you can sell 30 of each to markets that have 0 of each and make an easy $300. $300x2 for fruit and vegtables= already paying off your farm at minimum wage. then you can sell the milk,barley,wheat,oats and etc if there's a high demand which there's usually always a high demand for milk since it goes fast.

If you have a full staff you should be doing something like 2 milk and 2 of something else and 2 of another. preferably stuff thats in high demand or something that you know will soon be in high demand. Being a farmer requires a lot of market checking and traveling back and forth to sell stuff which is reccomended that when you get a farm, the first and foremost thing you should ever upgrade is your cart to the minimum that allows you to have a horse so you can have everyone work.

When you rake in enough money, buy other building that will only harmonize with the farm so you can make stuff for free and put it in those businesses instead of waiting until its in low demand on the market and buy it for dirt cheap which is usually never the case, ESPECIALLY if your trying to be a butcher to start off. Some buildings literally require you to have another building to support and supply it, if your ever to even think about owning it. If anyone was to think about owning a butcher shop to start off for example, you'd be SCREWD because there's almost NO hide or carcasses on the markets and you'd be paying way over the amount of money you'd get from making meat and hide off it.

This game is just fine so far with the market and everything, at least from what I've experienced. You just have to buy businesses strategically and be smart about what you do, especially when it comes to buying and selling stuff.

[Atorcoppe]

I think it’s swell that a lot of people seem to play the game in their own special way and have different methods of attaining success.

[TheDarkside]

Well, what I am hearing is, the farm is great IF...

a) you own businesses that require resources it produces
b) you spend a lot of time micromanaging it

But that doesn't really sell it to me. It sounds like too many conditions. I could own a mine or a metal shop which requires far less micromanagement and produces FAR more profit. I mean that's the whole determining factor of a asset isn't it? Is it more profitable than another given the same amount of management?

If it's only useless IF conditions A, B, C then that doesn't sound very attractive when faced with 10 other assets which are more profitable unconditionally.

I'm going to collect some data on the profitability of the various buildings to compare, now that I know about the extra worker bonus (actually more a penalty) I will do a better job of comparing them.

Edit: To add:

From the time I've spent playing the only business that seems to really suffer if you do not own a farm is the leather shop. The AI really doesn't like to produce hides/carcass. And based on my figures I can see why - it's not profitable.

Wheat, barley, fruit , veggies, milk, flour are all easy to find on the market when the AI controls those buildings. I've never had a problem getting enough of them without actually owning a farm myself

[Nelrea]

Maybe if you add some text by the workers to says the production is slowed a bit if you add more workers to it.

[Atorcoppe]

But it isn’t slowed at all - it just isn’t multiplied by the number of workers. There is loss, but 2 is still faster than 1.

[Nelrea]

i didnt know that there was a loss till today. so many ducets lost! lol

[Hypnoticborrat]

It's just common sense. If two people do a job, they aren't twice as good as one. You know what they say: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

[PartyMaster]

See the whole, conditions A and B are required to meet C thing applies fine in my opinion of the game. Back in the dark ages, ♥♥♥♥ wasn't always abundant in plentiful heaps of everything the F everyone wanted. If you start off as a butcher, alehouse manager and a few others without a proper cheap supplier, then your going to have an extremely rough time just like it was back in the dark ages. If it wasn't rough for them to find or do that, then that part wouldn't have been applied in the text "Dark Ages". ♥♥♥♥ was rough for business owners who didn't plan ahead or think about everything down to the wire.

Having a butcher shop and an alehouse to start wouldn't be reccomended because you'd get little profit and get no-where fast. Having a farm to start off with would be on the the best things ever because not only can you make a ridiculous amount just off the farm if you do it smart, when you buy additional businesses that synchronize with it, you'll literally be rolling in money. After I had a fully upgraded farm and bought an Alehouse, the amount of money I was making within the next few days of the game was ungodly. It took me only a few days to buy a butcher business after that.

[White Knight]

In my first game, I had an alehouse, and a bakeshop before I hit the social class wall.

Both of those businesses required raw materials every day that I could only get from the marketplace. I also tried to make use of all the available options, making mead, soups, baked goods, etc. It was laborious and very costly. My profits came in one handful at a time.

In my next game, I still had an alehouse but now I focused on making ale and porridge only. The bakeshop I simply ignored. My farms provided me with all the barley, oats and fruit I could need. The merchants at the marketplace no longer got my money for those supplies. Instead, I went to the market to collect their money for all the excess products I couldn't use.

The cost of the business is the same in both games, the cost of hiring staff was also the same, as was the value of the goods I produced. What changed is how I got my supplies. Instead of paying merchants good money (at variable prices with unreliable supply issues), I took total control of my supply chain from start to finish. The difference is that I now needed a wheelbarrow to carry my daily profits.

Having my workers double-up on tasks is only something I do when A) time is critical and I need the goods faster, or B) I need more of the goods sooner than later.

One worker makes ten barrels of ale each day (I'm just making these numbers up), two workers won't produce twenty, but it might be more like 15. Those five extra barrels might mean that my customers don't go thirsty and I don't lose business - that is worth the extra costs.

Building redundancies into your production line is an option - don't do it if it doesn't work out for you. It's simply a way of getting a little extra out of your shop each day. The same sort of thing applies to supervision. My being there doesn't count as another worker, it's just a small bonus due to the fact that everyone else works a little faster and smarter. Success is built upon those tiny gains. Every advantage counts.

Farms may not be the best way to get rich quick, but they are an important part of making steady and reliable profits from a number of businesses.

Simply put, farms are how you cut-out the middle man.